Hitachi Deskstar 7K250: Vancouver 3 HDD Review. Page 13

Today we would like to introduce to you a new third generation of IBM/Hitachi Vancouver hard disk drives. We will test and review the entire HDD family including the models with storage capacity of 250GB, 200GB, 160GB, 120GB, 80GB, 60GB and 40GB, featuring 8MB or 2MB buffer and supporting two types of interface: SATA and PATA. Find out more about these new Deskstar solutions from our detailed review!

This is quite a different test, usually very sensitive to deferred write operations, but it can’t help us differentiate between the three Vancouver generations! The Deskstar 120GXP is persistent in its desire to be as fast as the 7K250 whereas the Deskstar 180GXP is still aiming to win! We must have been too hasty to suppose that Hitachi didn’t spoil anything.

At last we have some order! The bigger cache buffer provides a performance bonus of up to 20 percent in FAT32, and less in NTFS. The Deskstar 120GXP and the 180GXP don’t give up still, and now we can say that this is no accident.

Summing up the WinBench section of the review, we show you the integral High-End Disk Winmarks result. So what do we have here?

Our hypothesis we expressed in the Average Access Time section that the electronics had been slowed down in the Deskstar 7K250 is confirmed in all the tests of WinBench. Having better physical characteristics, the Vancouver 3 finds it very hard to outperform its predecessors. The situation within the series looks like follows:

Serial ATA models are a little slower than their ATA analogs;

Larger cache buffer doesn’t improve the performance too much;

Results of the strange model of 60GB capacity can only be characterized as “deplorable”;